Changing majors in college

In My Humble Opinion
1

Tell me your stories, please. Why, how far into your original major were you, regrets, etc.

I love my geology coursework and have never gotten anything other than an A in those classes, but I’m struggling mightily with the physics. I’m halfway though my first semester pf physics, with one more semester plus a semester of geophysics to go. I struggled mightily with chemistry too, but did make it through without damaging my GPA too much. It stresses me so much, I get sick to my stomach sometimes (like before exams), and tears flow freely often. This is not what it is supposed to be about, right?

I’ve done a lot to deal with this. I see my physics prof 3-4 times a week with questions, I visit the help room when I can, I study (by reading or working on homework problems) every night, I talk with classmates. I still have problems wrapping my head around the concepts, and panic during weekly quizzes. I don’t think it is the math - I made it through calculus with A’s.

2

What would you change your major to?

3

How bad a tragedy would it be if you got a C? How much would it affect your career chances?

4

I always pretty much figured I would be going to law school.
My folks strongly encouraged me to get an undergrad in engineering (my dad’s profession) or business so I would “have something to fall back onto” should law not work out. Being a lazy shit who didn’t want to work hard enough to do science or math, I opted for business. Not sure if I declared between BA, Econ, or Fin.
Didn’t really care for any of the business classes - disliked some more than others. Really detested stats. I believe 2 stats classes were required. Dropped the first one the first time around, and then passed it.
Meanwhile, through my first 2 years I realized I had pretty much taken all of my electives, including a bunch of PolSci-Int’l Relations and Speech Com classes. And I was falling behind in the schedule for my requirements. I really liked one PolSci teacher in particular, and was really interested in nuclear policy (this was the era of SALT/START).
At some point - I believe early in my junior year, I found myself enrolled in the 2d stats class, and wanting to drop it. I had realized by now that I would rather “fall back onto” any number of sharp objects than a career in business should law not work out. When I went to the business office asking to drop, they essentially said I could as long as I never darkened their doors again. I gladly complied.

I’m glad I did not stick with business. Of course, 20 years later I realize my PolSci degree was essentially worthless, and really gave me little “knowledge” that I benefit from today. While in law school I pursued (but did not finish) a master’s in public admin. (The punchline is I had to take a grad level stats class!) My PolSci background may have played a role in my being hired by a gov’t agency, where I still am.

I think the biggest 180 I ever heard of was my roommate, who switched from biophysics to anthro/philosophy. No idea what he’s doing now.

5

My college’s first “grade” for Chem Eng is selective (this is in Spain). Instead of asking for high GPAs, they figure they’ll let in anybody who has a High School degree and let God sort 'em.

About 1/3 of the students never make it to the second grade; I’ve seen people with very high GPAs who couldn’t have made the cut in six years: I remember one who was superb at memorization but had no visual imagination.

One of our “dropouts” moved to “Philology (Germanic Languages)” and was terribly, terribly surprised when she found out that they were NOT going to teach her English; they expected her to already speak it well.

Whatever you decide to do, think about the consecuences. Not switching majors because “you’d be throwing two years away” is stupid if the other choice is spending forty years doing work that you hate. A C or two is most likely NOT the end of your career prospects - but at the same time, do you know what kind of jobs are you likely to get as a Geologist? Do you know what each of those jobs entails? Which ones you’d like to do, which ones you’d probably not love but still be willing to do, which ones you’re sure you’d hate? Apply the same questions to whatever “other” major you’re considering.

If I had 1€ for every idiot who went into Biology because “animals are cute”, stuck with it through college hating every minute in the lab and was later surprised that 95+% of jobs were “teaching” or “doing things to mice” I’d have enough for my next mortgage payment - or my two next!

6

Talk to your advisor. That’s what they’re there for.

If you can, try not to get the same professor for your next semester of physics. Having the right professor for a class can make more of a difference than most people think.

What are you planning to do with your degree in geology? Are you planning to go to grad school? If so, I can tell you that, at least in my field of astronomy/planetary sciences, having a C in a major course wasn’t a disqualifier for getting into a good grad school. Neither was having withdrawn from a course, incidentally. I assume that geology grad school might be similar (though I don’t know)- I doubt it’s as competitive as med school or law school to get into. For that matter, I don’t know for a fact that one C or withdrawal from a course is an automatic kiss of death for getting into a good med school or law school, either.

Every major seems to have at least one course that does this to students. You’re far from the only one who has ever experienced this. Ask a few pre-meds or biology majors about organic chemistry sometime. The nightmare classes that reduced people to sick stomachs and tears for physics majors at the University of Maryland when I went were the advanced lab courses.

7

Long time lurker, just registered to reply to this post…

I think I can beat that. Here’s my story:

I entered college as a music performance major at one of the top conservatories in the country, and things were pretty good for the first semester. However, I was one of the few unlucky freshmen that got stuck in the studio where the professor just lost his shot at tenure, and would be leaving at the end of the year. At least, that was the way it was supposed to go. In reality, the guy had some sort of breakdown between semesters, relating to the tenure decision and some sort of affair he had with a girl that was in his studio previously (the details are pretty vague). So, he didn’t show up until the end of the second semester, leaving me pretty much abandoned (for those of you that don’t know, the relationship with a private teacher is probably the single most important part of music school). The administration tried to fix this by bringing in various replacements, but the few lessons I had were contradictory and impersonal. It didn’t help that I started the semester in kind of a personal rut. Adding to that, I had to to deal with a true asshole of conductor for the first time, and music theory became increasingly more tedious. So, when my teacher finally showed up at the end of the semester, and saw that I had even fallen behind a bit while he was gone, he told me to quit. Bastard.

The administration was fairly considerate, and let me postpone my freshman jury for another semester. I was taking on rather substantial student loans (for a career that isn’t exactly lucrative even in the best case) and now I was behind. And by this time I didn’t even want to touch my instrument. While I was undoubtedly screwed over, I rationalized that since I couldn’t deal with such problems now, I probably wouldn’t be able to deal with the inevitable pressures that come with being a musician. So, I decided to transfer out.

After the second year first semester, where I took a good distribution of mid-level natural and social science classes to prove myself, I officially transferred from the Conservatory to the College and declared myself a Biology major. Luckily I had a good number of AP credits from high school to fall back on, so I wasn’t behind at all. In high school, music was my first choice for college, with engineering and biology next, so it wasn’t that huge of an adjustment for me at least.

Unfortunately, I kind of fumbled my second semester that year – my goals were pretty much “I should get an undergraduate degree, because, umm… I’m supposed to, I guess”. By now (my third year) I’ve started to get some focus… I had a chance to work in a biochem lab this summer, and I’ve started laying out plans for graduate school and a career. Right now I’m leaning towards something like biomedical engineering or biotech – some sort of applied science.

Right now my biggest regret is that I have to almost nothing but upper-level bio from now on (9 credits next semester :eek: ), meaning I’m gonna miss out on a lot of interesting electives. So, yeah, while I wish I could go back and not waste my first year of college and last years of high school, I’m not unhappy with where I am.

Back to your case…

You plainly like the geology itself, and are quite successful there. Don’t transfer because of a major’s co-requisites. Every major has a requirement that someone hates – how many med students enjoy and succeed in organic chemistry? Sure, the intro physics sucks for you, and things will probably be the same for the second semester. But I’d also guess that the geophysics will work out much better for you, since it directly connects to the topic you’re interested in.

My advice to you? Don’t change majors because of a single crappy requirement, and definitely don’t change without a very good idea of what else you’d want to do.

8

Can you drop the class and not have it affect your funding? This is gonna sound strange but, for a couple of classes I had trouble with, it really helped me to drop them late in the semester and then retake them. I found that having some familiarity with the material made it so much easier for me to really grasp the concepts the second time around. The classes I took over ultimately wound up being ones I really came to understand, rather than just muddling through with decent grades but a hazy grasp on.

9

I switched from physics and mathematics to mechanical engineering (with excursions through the electrical engineering, computer science, and engineering mechanics departments along the way). The primary emphasis came from a combination of my-then girlfriend urging me to undertake my education in something practical (i.e. not physics) and having a more-than-fulltime workload to pay tuition without taking out loans. While I enjoyed many of the classes in engineering (usually the mathematically-intensive ones most engineering students disliked) I really wish I’d completed the major in physics, even if I wasn’t going to end up working in the field.

As Anne Neville says, everybody has one (or more) of these classes that they struggle with. I actually had a difficult time with first semester Physics, just because the teacher was kind of an ass and wouldn’t answer questions in a straightforward manner in his office–this, despite having aced high school physics and being two semesters ahead in Calculus over everyone else. I also struggled with (and ended up dropping) Differential Equations the first time. My second go-around, I got an A (and was in the top two or three of the class). I got an A out of Partial Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, and Vector & Tensor Analysis too (despite that the teacher for the last was dreadful). Don’t let one class throw you, especially if you otherwise like the field and do well in classes.

Stranger

10

“impetus” not “emphasis”. My brain is more squirrelly today than a spreading oak in spring.

Stranger

11

Over 13 years of undergraduate work, at 11 different colleges/universities, I majored in:

Business
Biology
Criminal Justice
Geography
No Major Declared
History
Anthropology

I finally graduated with a degree in Social Sciences (Anthropology major, and dual minors in Sociology and European History). :eek: :smack:

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so I switched majors whenever I got bored with what I was learning. Doing that these days would be very…expensive.

12

All engineering majors had to take 5 courses together --there were a number of sections each semester, and they were taught by a variety of professors, but whatever flavor of engineer you wanted to be, you still had to take Ethics, Strengths, Natures, Statics, and Circuits (not in that order, and not neccessarily quite by those names).

A bunch of us Chemical Engineers were venting one day about the evils of Strengths when our (chemical engineering) professor walked in. Once he knew which class we were fussing about, he offered us sympathy, but not assistance. He’d barely made it through in his time, some twenty years earlier.

So if you want to change majors to get out of an evil co-requisite course, talk to your professor, or your advisor, or someone in the Geology department–someone who is experienced, and find out whether the evil course is one everyone struggles with and whether struggling with this course is evidence that you are likely to struggle with upper level courses, or whether this evil course is a member of that peculiar form of evil known as a “Weed-out course”–a class they make extra evil to chase out the people who don’t belong in it in the first place.

Nothing wrong with changing your major, but make sure you are doing it for the right reasons first. Get as much information as you can–and sadly most of that we can’t help you with, because it is likely to be institution specific.

13

My college career was a little schizo.

I excelled in percussion in HS but was burned out on the constant auditioning that was a big part of my classical music existence throughout high school.

So, my first year of college was liberal arts core courses plus a few electives and I took lessons and played here and there on the side. At the end of the year I decided I wanted to major in Geography.

I transferred to another school as a Geography major and during my first semester there I heard about a music professor who was into a lot of world music stuff that I was just starting to get into.

But in order to study with him I had to be a music major.

So, I auditioned and became a Music Ed major. I enjoyed studying Geography but at the time I didn’t really see it leading to anything. I studied with this professor but wasn’t much into the Ed thing, so I dropped the Ed courses. Quite frankly I can’t remember exactly what my major was for a couple semesters. I guess it was Music Ed minus the Ed courses. I remember studying with this guy and playing in various ensembles and at the same time I started drifting back into Geography and History. This is 20 years ago so the memory is a little dim.

The Bachelor of Arts in Music degree at my school allowed me to split my studies between Music and any other fields I desired (in my case Geography and History), so that’s what I wound up graduating with - once I completed a thesis.

It’s sort a generic degree but it IS a bachelor’s and it’s certainly been valuable as that.

I don’t regret studying exactly what I wanted to study. I enjoyed going to class most of the time. I do think, however, that I would have benefitted by sticking to one field and seeing it through despite the obstacles rather than drift back and forth like I did.

14

I was at university in Australian more than 40 years ago, so this may not be relevant to college in the US, but …

All through high school my best subject was mathematics, but in my second last year (going to a new high school, with a much better Engish teacher), I became more interested in English. So, for the first two years of my B.A. I did enough subjects so that I could have gone on to do an honours degree majoring either in English or in maths. I worked out later that in my second year, I was probably doing an illegal combination of subjects in order to keep my options open (I was doing in effect 7 subjects that year, when the maximum allowed was 5). But either no one noticed that, or, if they did, I was doing well enough that they didn’t care. I really only made the decision to major in English right at the start of the 3rd year of a 4-year degree – and then I went back, at another university, 3 years later to pick up enough subjects to get to the level of an honours degree in maths.

And now, 40 years later, it all seems pretty irrelevant, though I do use knowlerdge that I picked up in both areas in my current job.

15

I entered Berkeley as a math major, and my math career went on a straight downward decline. Got an A in Calculus in the 1st quarter of my freshman year; flunked Differential Equations in the last quarter of my sophomore year.

I took this as a sign…so I switched to Computer Science, which was not too wrenching – the CS major required some lower division math courses, so my experience was not thrown away.

I knew dozens of would-be doctors (half of the freshman class, it seems, wanted to be doctors) who got as far as Organic Chemistry, and decided they were better suited to liberal arts.

16

I entered as an Architectural Engineer, with the impression that I was an Electrical Engineer. I wanted to do Computer Science, and went to orientation for that, but the school of engineering found out, and didn’t want to give me my scholarship. The EE class I enrolled in spent the first week doing self-congratulatory back patting about how it was to be an engineer. As soon as I got to the work, I realized the class was mostly physics and I hated physics. I dropped it for an elective, without changing my major to CS, so I could keep the 2 grand.

Next semester, I filed for a major change (and a college change) that wouldn’t be effective until the following semester. By that time, I had figured out I was no good at computer science, and opted to take Chemistry in its place, a class I signed up for on a whim. Next semester I took intro to chem lab for chem majors, which assumed I knew everything there was to know about Chemistry, and I learned squat. During all this I changed my major to chemistry, which was effective immediately. After two semesters and an utter failure in a o chem lab, I figured out it would be a pain in the ass to graduate even a semester late with a chem degree, and I didn’t want a pain in the ass for something I didn’t like anymore, and wasn’t good at in the physical capacity.

All this time I had been taking French classes on the side. They were easy for me. I even signed up for the BA in chemistry program so I could continue taking them. After getting a D in o chem lab (which wasn’t entirely my fault) I decided to switch to French. I liked most of the classes immensely, especially the linguistically oriented ones, but then I had to go be a damn fool and graduate. Now I can’t find a job in my new location that applies my degree in any fashion. Hooray.

I don’t regret my final decision, but my father does. I do agree that moving to a small, remote community was not a good idea.

17

I realized I was advocating mental cruelty in my post. You should not say “organic chemistry” to pre-meds or biology majors, because the memory of the class (or the fear of it, for those who haven’t taken it yet) would probably traumatize them.

On the subject of pre-meds, are you in the same physics class that they take? I know that the general physics class taken by pre-meds (which wasn’t the one taken by engineering or physics majors) did serve as a weed-out class for them. I agree with Eureka that weed-out classes are evil.

And on the subject of picking the right professor, bear in mind that a professor can be nice, willing to give you help outside of class, and all that, but still not be very good at teaching the subject. Or his/her teaching style and your learning style just might not work well together. It could even be something as simple as the class being at 8am and you not being a morning person, or the class being at 4pm and you’re dragging by then, or the class is a two-hour class without a break and you just can’t stay focussed for that long, or the professor doesn’t believe in partial credit and you’re not very good at arithmetic.

Another thing you might want to check is whether or not there’s a curve in the class. Forgetting the curve is something that people who have gotten A’s in classes up until this class sometimes do- they’ve done well without a curve, and expect to do so in their classes. There’s something that a physics professor of mine came up with- Anlage’s (pronounced on-log-uh) Theorem- the average on the first test of the semester is 60%, ± 5%. It really did work remarkably well to predict the first test in physics major and non-major classes.

Something else you might want to consider if your stress over this class is really messing up your life- your college almost certainly offers counseling services through student health services. I used to stress a lot over exams, among other things, and it turned out that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which I now take medication for (and it helps). Even if you don’t have an anxiety disorder like I do, the counselors might be able to teach you some coping strategies to deal with the stress this class is causing in your life. I didn’t get treatment for anxiety until quite a while after I graduated from college, and I really wish I’d done it earlier- I suffered for many years without needing to.

18

I switched from being a biology major to studying economics. I took one semester of biology and did fairly well in it but I loathed going to the class and just didn’t feel like I was interested in it. The second semester was even worse. I was doing much better in Chemistry class which I had no interest in. One morning I woke up with a hangover and immediately decided that I was changing majors. It was strange because once I made that decision, I was in a much better mood and felt much better. I talked it over with some friends over lunch and called my parents in order to discuss it with them.

I certainly enjoyed being an economics major a lot more than a biology major. I still graduated college a semester early because of a combination of summer classes that I took so I wouldn’t fall behind and some AP credits I brought in. I still regret doing that since I would have enjoyed some of the classes I could have taken, but I felt that since I was eligible to graduate I should.

19

There are not very many majors where you can completely avoid physics. If you like the geology courses, stick with geology as a major.

Don’t worry too much about it affecting your GPA either. If worse comes to worse, just list your Major GPA on your resume.

20

I want to thank everyone who responded to my post, I really appreciate the input and feedback.

I’m not sure. I’m doing a minor in cartography/GIS (it fits well with the geology major) and something in that area might be more suitable - and no physics involved.

I wouldn’t be happy with a C, but I’d live (as a friend of mine says, “D’s get degrees”). I’m sure it wouldn’t have that big of an effect on my career choice, but I haven’t decided exactly what I want to do yet. I’m aiming for grad school, where grades will matter.

I have talked to my advisor, a bit. He told me that by just keeping my head above water in physics (which I am doing, but I have no confidence in myself keeping that up for 2 more exams) I’m doing better than many of his advisees. I have personally talked to 3 people in my major who took physics more than once before they graduated. I try and not compare myself to others, but that doesn’t make me feel so bad, knowing I’m not the only one who has problems with physics.

I don’t think the prof is the problem (he is very good, probably the best or close to it at my school, and he teaches well - but he does expect a lot), but I am planning on taking a different prof next semester due to a) the original professor’s section interferes with another class I need to take, and b) maybe I should have said this in the original post, but I am taking the calculus-based physics class that all the physics majors are in, not the easier (algebra-based) class. Most of these people are physics majors because they like it. Many of them have had some physics in high school. I’m 41 years old and this is my first physics class. Looking back it was stupid to take this class (I should have taken the class other science/earth science majors take), but I thought this class would look better on grad school apps.

Thanks for coming out of lurkdom, and for the advice.

I’d rather not do that. I did that for one of my chemistry semesters and ended up getting a decent grade, but not that much better than what I would have gotten had I stuck it out the first time - and I had to sit though that awful stuff twice!

Most of the other students in this class are physics/engineering majors. The class is at 11:15 am- just perfect. There is no curve, and 95% is the A cutoff. A- is 90%. There is a large window for B’s (down to 76%, I think) and I’ve managed to stay within that, so far. But the material covered is not getting any easier.

I have seen a school counselor - this same thing happened to me with chemistry. I know I’m panicking and I don’t want to do something impulsive, like change majors. Now I’m glad I started this thread. Many things in here have made me feel better, thanks.

Non-science majors do :wink: Sometimes I wonder if picking a science major wasn’t a big mistake, honestly. Math has never been my strong point, but once I got to college I did fine in it. I’m slow at it, but I got A’s.